Welcome to ShopTalk – an Adobe Scene7 blog featuring "Quick Tips", trends, best practices and more – written by Peter Noel, Sheila Dahlgren and their band of industry experts who live and breathe web, rich media and customer experience.

eCommerce in the Next Decade - What's Your Experience?

With a new decade upon us, the focus on customer experience with greater attention to rich site functionality (zoom & video) and social media (blogs & reviews) continues to blaze the trends trail. But we already knew that. Our 2009 quantitative survey, "Online Customer Experience - The Next Generation", received 474 responses from retailers, agencies, media, manufacturers, and high-tech companies worldwide, and we were able to identify nearly 12 months ago that the key trends shaping the eCommerce landscape are largely focused on enhancing customer experience. For example:

• 92% of respondents planned to conduct customer experience projects within the year

• The top five features deployed among all respondents included lifestyle imagery/photos (38%), alternative images (36%), audio/animation (31%), blogs (29%), and zoom (27%)

Ultimately, consumers are looking to e-tailers to provide more than products and traditional product information, they are wanting to be heard and understood and even messaged to appropriately which means that merchandisers will have to commit to more sophisticated solutions, including the more robust integration of rich media, rich Internet applications and social media.

So what's in store for the future? We think a continued emphasis on multi-channel shopping with mobile being a key driver and the next big growth area. Tell us what you think. Take the Adobe Scene7 2010 Survey: Customer Experience in the New Decade and you'll not only help to shape what online trends will drive 2010, but you'll have first access to the worldwide results covering rich media/merchandising, social media, mobile and personalization features used or planned to enhance customer experience.

ShopTalk is a blog featuring "Quick Tips", trends and more written by experts from the Adobe Scene7 team who live and breathe web, rich media and customer experience. This interactive forum offers insights and best practices on the latest trends we are seeing in the marketplace to help improve your customer experience, ultimately driving conversions and revenues.